Harry F. Byrd Jr.

Harry F. Byrd Jr. (20 December 1914-30 July 2013) was a US Senator from Virginia from 12 November 1965 to 3 January 1983, succeeding Harry F. Byrd and preceding Paul Trible.

Biography
Harry F. Byrd Jr. was born in Winchester, Virginia in 1914, the eldest son of US Senator Harry F. Byrd and a member of the prominent Byrd family. In 1935, he became editor and publisher of his father's newspaper The Winchester Star, and he also published the Harrisonburg Daily News Record from 1936 to 1941 and from 1946 to 1981. He served in the US Navy during World War II from 1941 to 1945 and went on to serve in the House of Delegates from 1948 to 1965 and in the US Senate from 1965 to 1983. In 1970, he broke with the Democratic Party rather than support the party's undetermined 1972 presidential nominee, and the widely popular Byrd won re-election to the Senate with 54% of the vote, becoming the first independent to win a US Senate seat by a majority vote. He was a staunch conservative who supported federal discipline, and he stood by his earlier resistance to school desegregation, claiming that it reduced racial violence. He retired in 1982 and returned to his newspapers, and he supported 1989 Republican gubernatorial nominee Marshall Coleman, 2004 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mark Warner, and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He died in 2013 at the age of 98.